Samsung Apps has its first birthday, boasts 14 million downloads

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While I still find Bada — Samsung’s in-house smartphone platform — mostly baffling, that doesn’t mean there isn’t a market for it. After all, most people can’t tell their OSes from their ASes, and just want a pretty phone that does things that phones should.

It’s now been 12 months since Samsung launched their own app store — the imaginatively entitled Samsung Apps — and to honour the occasion they want to share their tales of success.

Samsung apps is now available in 109 countries, and has proudly served 14 million downloads, thanks largely to phones like the Wave.

Now, this store is the same store that serves apps to Samsung HDTVs, so the numbers aren’t smartphone exclusive, and Samsung have also chosen not to share any info concerning the number of apps available in the store, which would be a more useful guide.

To put this in context: 14 million downloads — while a large number — is nothing compared to the numbers Apple’s App Store achieved when it launched in 2008: 10 million downloads in its first three days.

Of course, nobody expected Bada to be a real competitor to the iPhone, but — as a developer — I’d probably question the merits of investing time and money into a niche platform.